You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

CPU workloads tend to be something that so long as you've a bit of fast cache, memory speed isn't that important. That cache buffer is enough to get you extremely high performance. Not the case with GPU workloads. They are very memory bound. If you look at high end GPUs they have stupid amounts of RAM bandwidth compared to CPUs.

Well, if you try and do both on one chip, you are gonna need fast RAM if you want it to work well.

You're a bit late on that one. Pretty much everything is propaganda, and what's more, virtually all of it is fear-based; the remainder focuses on allaying fears, often reasonable ones. My favorite example is automotive advertising. As much as half of it is designed not directly to sell cars, but to make customers feel better about their purchases to try to induce repeat business "down the road", pun intended.

If it bleeds, it leads. Hope is not interesting to people who have more than they need.

We got there because of decades of people systematically giving their money to the most sensational press, which enabled them to become more powerful. It's not something that just happened.

I think that there probably oughta be a law that you can't knowingly tell an outright lie and call it news, but even that seems to be a minority view, which is just another symptom of the same damned need for entertainment.

There's nothing wrong with that, so long as they don't propose to use force to retrieve the data.

Balderdash. There is not a press. What is this, communism, comrade? We have many presses. The problem is that the public follows the sensational ones instead of the informative. We The People have the government, and thus the press, which we deserve.

But it in fact is; it's not all obvious. Being forced to work is slavery even if you get paid, because you're not choosing the terms of your employment. It's like being raped and then having your rapist throw you a few currency units.

They have. They just haven't bragged about it and tried to start a business.

You can see it right in the Slashdot thread where people link to Youtube videos of this being done a long time ago. The idea of "stick a filter on a fan" isn't new because that's PRECISELY what air filters are. They don't make any bones about it.

So, why doesn't everyone do it? Well because it turns out DIY isn't much cheaper if you want it to work well. When I first heard of the idea, on Youtube, I said "let's try that!" Went and got out one of my box fans, bought a filter at Home Depot, and taped it all together. Well I quickly discovered two flaws with this system:

1) Furnace filters aren't near as good as HEPA filters, particularly not the multi-stage system good units have. It did reduce particle count, but not a ton. I could buy better filters, for sure, but then the cost goes up. Buying a filter with a large surface area like good units have gets quite expensive, much like the filters they have themselves.

2) A regular fan is not well suited to the static pressure you get trying to push through a filter. It had very little airflow. Better sealing would have helped some of that, but of course that's more money and effort, but part of it is you just need a good fan. That is again one of the things that the high end units have. They have a fan particularly made to deal with high static pressure, and a case made force lots of air through the filters.

So easier, and not really any more expensive in the long run, to just buy a filter unit. On the cheaper end of things, there's Austin Air units. Basically you pay $250 for a metal box with a powerful fan in it, and another $250 for a huge filter. Every 5 years or so, you pay another $250 for a new filter. Not the world's best filtration stats, but pretty good, better than furnace filters, and cheaper when you look at how long it lasts. At the high end that's IQAir. $1000 for a unit, but the unit and filters last a long time. I particular their HEPA filter can last a decade or more, provided you replace the prefilters when it tells you to.

That's the thing here: This is NOT a new idea, people were talking about it online a minimum of 6 years ago, and it is also not a hard idea since it is literally doing what the filters do. They are simple devices, they have diagrams of how they work on their websites. The cost is in a good fan, and good filters.

Finally, with regards to particle count, you need to be careful that you specify what size and have a counter that can deal with it. One of the reason IQAir units cost so much is they filter extremely tiny particles, like clean room level, viruses and so on. That is much harder to do than larger stuff. Now maybe you don't care, ok fair enough, but don't try and act like it is the same level of performance. You can very well get cheaper air filters that don't filter as well, or as small a particles.

There are reasons to want to own an air purifier even if you live in a place that doesn't have tons of pollution.

The most common would be allergies. If you get a decent one, it can nab pollen out of the air no problem. This can make living in a place where you have allergies to something much more tolerable.

They also help with dust accumulation. I live in the desert so we get lots of particles in the air, humans or no humans. An air filter can help clean that up. Makes it easier to keep the house clean.

Also the real good ones can get bacteria, even viruses, they filter things so small. So it can help limit the spread of disease in your house. Not a silver bullet by any means, but it can help keep the could a kid brought some from spreading.

Not saying China doesn't need to clean up their act, but these things weren't made because of their problems. The big names in it are western anyhow. IQAir (Switzerland) and Austin Air (US) are probably the two best known for high end, small units. In particular if you are talking a $1000 unit, that's IQAir. Their filtration is clean-room levels of good.

Or I can connect it to a Linux VM and see what that has to say about it...

Welcome to the American legal system, where selective prosecution is standard operating procedure. The only reason to have a legal system which does not require prosecution for known crimes is to permit treating some people differently than others. It leads to the proliferation of bad laws.

That 10% more would probably just go into the pockets of their rich. It's not like they don't have them there, too. They infest everything.